8 ms·

Show HN: NimForum – A lightweight alternative to Discourse

186 points by dom96 8y ago

beagle3 8y ago
Nim is awesome - the programming language, the community, and the emerging ecosystem. Live example, for discussing the Nim programming language: https://forum.nim-lang.org/ https://forum.nim-lang.org/ ; Dominik Picheta (dom96), the main author of NimForum, is one of the core Nim language developers and is one of the people making the Nim community so awesome. Thanks, Dom. The Nim developers practice dogfooding, and NimForum is one result of that practice. I haven't had much mileage with this new version (the actual Nim forum was updated just a couple of days ago), but the previous revision was incredibly fast and responsive, and had the feature of running example code within the forum. The usefulness of this feature in a programming language forum cannot be overstated -- I think it shortens the average discussion thread by 50%, and makes it way more useful to boot. This newer version looks much better but has two issues compared to the previous one: (a) it won't run example code within the forum, and (b) it won't work without JavaScript. IIUC the first will be solved shortly, the second might take a little more time (but ... if you can just run the older version in the mean time if it bothers you).
- dom96 8y ago
  I didn't realise the ability to run Nim code on the forum was such a coveted feature. I did initially plan to reimplement it for the new forum (the "Run" button is there, it just needs the logic), but sadly I ran out of time and decided to prioritise other things. I've thought about continuing the non-SPA nature of the original forum, but with Araq's new Karax framework being available I couldn't resist using it (and of course Araq really wanted me to as well). Even though the forum doesn't run without JS I do still think this was a good decision. In the long run we can probably render the page on the server side, because the front end is written in Nim this should be fairly simple.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    For sure, the new version is much more aesthetically pleasing and (if JS is enabled) at least as functional. I wasn't trying to criticize anything, just point it out as a matter of fact. I think it's a good decision too, even though I generally like non-js sites. Did you verify that Google and DuckDuckGo manage to index the forum topics? That would be my concern, much more than the "no JS, lame" crowd. Every programming language forum has, in about 80% of the answers including a code sample, a disclaimer of the ".. or something like this, I didn't actually try to run it" -- and usually the answer also has a type, missing import/include, etc - which makes it less useful for newbies, even though it's usually helpful enough to more experienced users. The only languages for this isn't true (that I've seen) are the APL/J/K family, where a complete working answer is usually 2-3 lines so people try it in a console before posting; and Nim since you introduced the "run" button to the older forum.
bberrry 8y ago
Thanks, this is the first thing I've seen actually implemented in Nim. Will be interesting too look through some actual code.
gyyfl 8y ago
This is great but I wish developers would get away from naming software based on the language it's coded in, in general. It's purely a public relations thing but I think the practice creates an impression of valuing process over product, and conceptually ties a product to a particular language ecosystem as a sort of implicit presumption.
- reificator 8y ago
  Libraries I don't mind: how much time do you really want to spend naming the 394th serialization library? But for products aimed at end-users? Absolutely don't name it after the language it's written in. To play devil's advocate for a moment though: this is the software used to run the forum for the language Nim. If you've ever been to the Nim forums, this is a version you can run yourself. Maybe that makes the name a bit more reasonable?
  - dom96 8y ago
    I do agree that NimForum is a bit of a lame name for end-users. The initial NimForum implementation was very much intended to only be used for the Nim community, with this new version I wanted to make it possible for others to use it as well. I have thought about creating a new identity for this project, but I couldn't come up with a good name on the spot (or at least one that others liked), so for now I just decided to keep the old NimForum name. Certainly if there is interest I will happily consider rebranding.
    - tbirdz 8y ago
      What about NimbleForum? Still keeps the Nim reference, while also giving the impression of a fast and light forum.
      - dom96 8y ago
        Hehe, good idea, but that clashes with the name of our package manager: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble :)
wiradikusuma 8y ago
I wonder why sqlite? Isn't quite limiting for a client-server app?
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  I suppose nimforum's developer is comfortable limiting it to just one web server, because with an efficient, AOT-compiled language like Nim, a single server can bear a heavy load. Still, performance isn't everything. What about high availability through redundancy? I see that forum.nim-lang.org is behind CloudFlare. Is that the answer? Finally, what about disaster recovery? In the absence of replication, I hope forum.nim-lang.org at least has backups.
  - dom96 8y ago
    You're very right to point out high availability and disaster recovery. I must be honest that I haven't considered the impact that the use of SQLite has on redundancy, but in the multiple years that I have been running the forum I never needed it, a single instance of the forum works perfectly fine. I would say that for most communities, setting up the forum on a VPS and letting it run will be perfectly adequate and that creating redundant servers would be overkill. As for backups, of course we do have them. Although I've also recently learned that we could be handling them better. SQLite has a backup API that we should make use of[1]. The main reason I have set up CloudFlare is for DDoS protection. I learned the hard way that Digital Ocean will null route a VPS' network if they detect a DDoS. 1 - https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html
    - mwcampbell 8y ago
      Fair enough. How do you do backups?
      - dom96 8y ago
        Mainly using DigitalOcean's droplet backups.
Quequau 8y ago
Slightly off topic but... my social circle grew concerned about our privacy some years ago and some of us, including myself, really didn't want to continue using a 'private' Facebook group. After a fair bit of trial and error we wound up using a vanilla Discourse image on some AWS provider. It's turned out to be the best think we've done for our friendships in decades.
- yoavm 8y ago
  Can you share more on how you use it?
  - Quequau 8y ago
    I'm not a web guy so I'm not 100% familiar with the details but as far as I understand it's nothing more than a vanilla Discourse image from an outfit called bitnami running on the smallest instance available on Amazon... and absolutely nothing else. Presumably it's what discourse looks & acts like before people wrap their business logic / webpage around it.
    - yoavm 8y ago
      oh I didn't mean from the technical aspect. I meant socially, how it works. What kind of things your friends post there, how often you go check what's up with them, with type of discussions you have there etc'.
      - Quequau 8y ago
        I don't use any other social media. So I post everything that pops into my mind, news that I read elsewhere, things that go in my life, and often stuff that's much more personal than I would have ever posted anywhere else. The discussion is much the same as what I suppose people have on Facebook, Instagram or whatever... though it's orders of magnitude more civil and reasonable. Roughly half the group has also abandoned all other social media, while the other half occasionally act as a Facebook diode by posting worthy or important things they might come across. As the group now lives in several different countries on different continents, having a mechanism that helps us work around time zone constraints which isn't an unmanageable tangle of email chains is hugely beneficial. It's remarkable how making things easier to keep track of wound up facilitating a lot more discussion. Also as it's just us we have no constraints concerning thread life cycles. So when something occurs that relates to our discussion in some ancient thread it's not a problem to revive it. So we've got threads that run over the course of five years.
accnumnplus1 8y ago
Having had only the briefest of looks at Nim (the last 60 seconds), it seems most comparable to Go - correct? Anyone more clued up feel like contrasting the two?
- e12e 8y ago
  I'd say go is to c as nim is to Pascal would be one approximation. But that doesn't really do justice to nim's power in the form of meta/compile time programming and such.
  - k__ 8y ago
    I had the impression Nim was Python in fast.
    - nitely 8y ago
      Some of the syntax is similar, but similarities end there. Nim was inspired by many languages: Modula 3, Delphi, Ada, C++, Python, Lisp, Oberon, C# and Pascal.
WalterBright 8y ago
The D language forums: https://forum.dlang.org/ are powered by DFeed, written in D: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
- vasili111 8y ago
  It is very fast and responsive. It is really a pleasure to navigate it :)
- ShorsHammer 8y ago
  Just a note: Those links aren't clickable :(
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    I clicked them just fine (??).
kybernetikos 8y ago
The forums seem simple, pleasant and fairly snappy to navigate. I've recently been looking at 'head-less' CMSs. Does anyone know of forum software that separates the head from the backend via a well described API? I'd like to be able to embed a forum into a front end application that I already have, so having a 'head-less' forum would be pretty useful.
- dom96 8y ago
  NimForum does exactly that. The API probably isn't as stable as it could be though. Discourse could be another alternative for you.
weego 8y ago
Why would forum software be a good use case for an SPA?

186 points by dom96 8y ago

Nim is awesome - the programming language, the community, and the emerging ecosystem. Live example, for discussing the Nim programming language: https://forum.nim-lang.org/ https://forum.nim-lang.org/ ; Dominik Picheta (dom96), the main author of NimForum, is one of the core Nim language developers and is one of the people making the Nim community so awesome. Thanks, Dom. The Nim developers practice dogfooding, and NimForum is one result of that practice. I haven't had much mileage with this new version (the actual Nim forum was updated just a couple of days ago), but the previous revision was incredibly fast and responsive, and had the feature of running example code within the forum. The usefulness of this feature in a programming language forum cannot be overstated -- I think it shortens the average discussion thread by 50%, and makes it way more useful to boot. This newer version looks much better but has two issues compared to the previous one: (a) it won't run example code within the forum, and (b) it won't work without JavaScript. IIUC the first will be solved shortly, the second might take a little more time (but ... if you can just run the older version in the mean time if it bothers you).

dom96 8y ago
I didn't realise the ability to run Nim code on the forum was such a coveted feature. I did initially plan to reimplement it for the new forum (the "Run" button is there, it just needs the logic), but sadly I ran out of time and decided to prioritise other things. I've thought about continuing the non-SPA nature of the original forum, but with Araq's new Karax framework being available I couldn't resist using it (and of course Araq really wanted me to as well). Even though the forum doesn't run without JS I do still think this was a good decision. In the long run we can probably render the page on the server side, because the front end is written in Nim this should be fairly simple.
- beagle3 8y ago
  For sure, the new version is much more aesthetically pleasing and (if JS is enabled) at least as functional. I wasn't trying to criticize anything, just point it out as a matter of fact. I think it's a good decision too, even though I generally like non-js sites. Did you verify that Google and DuckDuckGo manage to index the forum topics? That would be my concern, much more than the "no JS, lame" crowd. Every programming language forum has, in about 80% of the answers including a code sample, a disclaimer of the ".. or something like this, I didn't actually try to run it" -- and usually the answer also has a type, missing import/include, etc - which makes it less useful for newbies, even though it's usually helpful enough to more experienced users. The only languages for this isn't true (that I've seen) are the APL/J/K family, where a complete working answer is usually 2-3 lines so people try it in a console before posting; and Nim since you introduced the "run" button to the older forum.

bberrry 8y ago

Thanks, this is the first thing I've seen actually implemented in Nim. Will be interesting too look through some actual code.

gyyfl 8y ago

This is great but I wish developers would get away from naming software based on the language it's coded in, in general. It's purely a public relations thing but I think the practice creates an impression of valuing process over product, and conceptually ties a product to a particular language ecosystem as a sort of implicit presumption.

reificator 8y ago
Libraries I don't mind: how much time do you really want to spend naming the 394th serialization library? But for products aimed at end-users? Absolutely don't name it after the language it's written in. To play devil's advocate for a moment though: this is the software used to run the forum for the language Nim. If you've ever been to the Nim forums, this is a version you can run yourself. Maybe that makes the name a bit more reasonable?
- dom96 8y ago
  I do agree that NimForum is a bit of a lame name for end-users. The initial NimForum implementation was very much intended to only be used for the Nim community, with this new version I wanted to make it possible for others to use it as well. I have thought about creating a new identity for this project, but I couldn't come up with a good name on the spot (or at least one that others liked), so for now I just decided to keep the old NimForum name. Certainly if there is interest I will happily consider rebranding.
  - tbirdz 8y ago
    What about NimbleForum? Still keeps the Nim reference, while also giving the impression of a fast and light forum.
    - dom96 8y ago
      Hehe, good idea, but that clashes with the name of our package manager: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble :)

wiradikusuma 8y ago

I wonder why sqlite? Isn't quite limiting for a client-server app?

mwcampbell 8y ago
I suppose nimforum's developer is comfortable limiting it to just one web server, because with an efficient, AOT-compiled language like Nim, a single server can bear a heavy load. Still, performance isn't everything. What about high availability through redundancy? I see that forum.nim-lang.org is behind CloudFlare. Is that the answer? Finally, what about disaster recovery? In the absence of replication, I hope forum.nim-lang.org at least has backups.
- dom96 8y ago
  You're very right to point out high availability and disaster recovery. I must be honest that I haven't considered the impact that the use of SQLite has on redundancy, but in the multiple years that I have been running the forum I never needed it, a single instance of the forum works perfectly fine. I would say that for most communities, setting up the forum on a VPS and letting it run will be perfectly adequate and that creating redundant servers would be overkill. As for backups, of course we do have them. Although I've also recently learned that we could be handling them better. SQLite has a backup API that we should make use of[1]. The main reason I have set up CloudFlare is for DDoS protection. I learned the hard way that Digital Ocean will null route a VPS' network if they detect a DDoS. 1 - https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    Fair enough. How do you do backups?
    - dom96 8y ago
      Mainly using DigitalOcean's droplet backups.

Quequau 8y ago

Slightly off topic but... my social circle grew concerned about our privacy some years ago and some of us, including myself, really didn't want to continue using a 'private' Facebook group. After a fair bit of trial and error we wound up using a vanilla Discourse image on some AWS provider. It's turned out to be the best think we've done for our friendships in decades.

yoavm 8y ago
Can you share more on how you use it?
- Quequau 8y ago
  I'm not a web guy so I'm not 100% familiar with the details but as far as I understand it's nothing more than a vanilla Discourse image from an outfit called bitnami running on the smallest instance available on Amazon... and absolutely nothing else. Presumably it's what discourse looks & acts like before people wrap their business logic / webpage around it.
  - yoavm 8y ago
    oh I didn't mean from the technical aspect. I meant socially, how it works. What kind of things your friends post there, how often you go check what's up with them, with type of discussions you have there etc'.
    - Quequau 8y ago
      I don't use any other social media. So I post everything that pops into my mind, news that I read elsewhere, things that go in my life, and often stuff that's much more personal than I would have ever posted anywhere else. The discussion is much the same as what I suppose people have on Facebook, Instagram or whatever... though it's orders of magnitude more civil and reasonable. Roughly half the group has also abandoned all other social media, while the other half occasionally act as a Facebook diode by posting worthy or important things they might come across. As the group now lives in several different countries on different continents, having a mechanism that helps us work around time zone constraints which isn't an unmanageable tangle of email chains is hugely beneficial. It's remarkable how making things easier to keep track of wound up facilitating a lot more discussion. Also as it's just us we have no constraints concerning thread life cycles. So when something occurs that relates to our discussion in some ancient thread it's not a problem to revive it. So we've got threads that run over the course of five years.

accnumnplus1 8y ago

Having had only the briefest of looks at Nim (the last 60 seconds), it seems most comparable to Go - correct? Anyone more clued up feel like contrasting the two?

e12e 8y ago
I'd say go is to c as nim is to Pascal would be one approximation. But that doesn't really do justice to nim's power in the form of meta/compile time programming and such.
- k__ 8y ago
  I had the impression Nim was Python in fast.
  - nitely 8y ago
    Some of the syntax is similar, but similarities end there. Nim was inspired by many languages: Modula 3, Delphi, Ada, C++, Python, Lisp, Oberon, C# and Pascal.

WalterBright 8y ago

The D language forums: https://forum.dlang.org/ are powered by DFeed, written in D: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

vasili111 8y ago
It is very fast and responsive. It is really a pleasure to navigate it :)
ShorsHammer 8y ago
Just a note: Those links aren't clickable :(
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  I clicked them just fine (??).

kybernetikos 8y ago

The forums seem simple, pleasant and fairly snappy to navigate. I've recently been looking at 'head-less' CMSs. Does anyone know of forum software that separates the head from the backend via a well described API? I'd like to be able to embed a forum into a front end application that I already have, so having a 'head-less' forum would be pretty useful.

dom96 8y ago
NimForum does exactly that. The API probably isn't as stable as it could be though. Discourse could be another alternative for you.

weego 8y ago

Why would forum software be a good use case for an SPA?